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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28942161">A Walk in the Woods</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata'>Tabata</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Leoverse [206]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Glee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alien/Human Relationships, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe - Aliens, M/M, Omega Verse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:09:00</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,805</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28942161</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>During a nice walk in the jungle with Leo and the kids--kittens, Blaine makes an upsetting discovery.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Blaine Anderson/Original Male Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Male Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Leoverse [206]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>A Walk in the Woods</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>WARNING:</b> This story is an <b>AU</b> from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.<br/>This is the Pocahontas/Avatar-inspired verse that was still missing in the series. Did you think we weren't going to go there? Think again. In this instance of the universe, JohnSmith!Blaine meets Pocahontas!Leo, who's not a native american princess with a willow grandmother, but a catish-like alien with a bigger catish-like boyfriend. Big colors of the wind lessons ensue.</p>
<p>Written for:<br/>Esploratori del Polyverso (Chapter 2, Mission 1)<br/><i>prompt:</i> There must be a jungle in the story</p>
<p>Maritombola #11<br/><i>prompt:</i> Uneasiness</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When Blaine enrolled in the army – some three or four geological eras ago, as Adam is so quick to point out every time the subject comes up – he never thought he would get to know the surroundings of any place he was going to be. He was very young, he enrolled just to annoy his rich father and he was very stupid. He just wanted to shoot at things and be paid for it.</p>
<p>When he accepted this mission for, and he quotes, <i>other planets</i> – which implied the government had no clue of what they were going to find or even if they were going to find something – he did it specifically because the pay was way higher than it had been so far. Once again, he expected to build camps and, only if it was extremely necessary (he is older, after all) shoot aliens. He ended up basically doing neither as the camp was pretty much self-building and the aliens have been keeping to themselves so far. Except one, of course, who slipped into his bed way more earlier than he's comfortable admitting.</p>
<p>How, after all this, he ended up here in the middle of an alien jungle taking a walk with three babies? Puppies? Kittens? – The correct definition still eludes him and he and Leo have not enough shared vocabulary for Blaine to ask him – and their father, he doesn't know.</p>
<p>Only six weeks ago – when Leo first brought them to him in a basket so he could meet them – they looked exactly like newborn human babies, except that they were a little smaller and they had cat ears and tails like their fathers. But, as Blaine soon found out, alien babies grow way faster than human babies do. Now the triplets are already able to run around autonomously, climb three and somewhat talk – nothing big, just a few words in their very complex, very apostrophe-oriented language. In little more than a month they already look like three-year-olds.</p>
<p>“Why you look them with face?” Leo asks, meaning Blaine's frown. Leo is looking at him, who's in fact looking at the three little creatures jumping recklessly from tree branch to tree branch as if they were squirrells instead of human-cat hybrids. They don't seem to be taking the possibility of falling down and breaking a bone into consideration. Neither is Leo.</p>
<p>“I'm worried—uh, <i>t'etch</i>,” he tries in Leo's language. That's a difficult word and at this point he highly doubt that he will ever be able to pronounce it properly. “They could fall and get hurt.”</p>
<p>“Fall?”</p>
<p>Blaine tries to explain himself with gestures. “You know, from the trees.”</p>
<p>“Oh yes,” Leo nods and then shakes his head. “No, it is normal. Babies are very in trees. If fall, they go up again.”</p>
<p>Blaine chuckles. “This is the longest sentence I ever heard you say,” he says. “Good job.”</p>
<p>“I practice,” Leo informs him. “Babies sleep a lot. I look them.”</p>
<p>Blaine watches as the triplets climb a tall tree with a weirdly twisted trunk that they ended up calling berry-bearer because of its bulbous plum-colored leaves that look like giant blueberries. He has no idea what its real name is and he doesn't dare asking Leo for it, fearing an answer with too many syllables he inevitably won't be able to pronounce properly. Besides, if orders from above say to colonize this planet, they don't need local names for anything. This is an annoying thought, even by his own standard. One that he doesn't want to linger on because it leads to dangerous thoughts of treachery. He's already postponing a report on the real conditions of the place that they've been asking him for weeks. He thinks that's insubordination enough.</p>
<p>“You think,” Leo says, ignoring the correct tense, as per usual.</p>
<p>“I was just enjoying how beautiful this part of the jungle is,” Blaine answers, smiling at him. And it is, indeed, beautiful. He learned early on, during the first few recons they did in the wake of their arrival, that this corner of the planet – which is a <i>very</i>, and he can't stress this enough, very little corner – is roughly divided in two climatic zones. The one they're currently in, which is a weird mix of tropical and temperate, and a second one, apparently much colder but still habitable. They have plans of exploring the cold zone too at a later stage, and the rest of the planet after that, but all in due time – and with more people, he would like to add.</p>
<p>In this very moment, he's got barely enough men to keep the camp up and running. He doesn't have any to spare for exploring missions – he will count this as an exploration, even if it looks more like a kindergarten field trip.</p>
<p>“Where are we going?” He asks, right before one of the kids falls on his shoulder, followed by his brothers. Blaine tries to catch him, but the kid is scared by the sudden fall and very determined to escape the other two, so he hisses and weasles out of his hands. Suddenly, Blaine's body becomes the scene of a very fast, very violent fight, that breaks only because Leo straighout growls at his children – which, honestly, is a little upsetting, way more than his purring. The kittens scatter in three different directions, leaving Blaine disheveled and his shirt with one button less. Luckily, they have no claws.</p>
<p>“Sorry,” Leo chuckles. “Sometimes they do that.”</p>
<p>“It's okay. They are kids. What was I saying?”</p>
<p>“We go to the—fallwater,” he says after a little hesitation. “Big water. It's purple.”</p>
<p>You'd think he couln't get the easiest, most straightforward word in the English language wrong – water that falls, waterfall – but he does because Leo is like that. “A waterfall, uh? Why is it purple?” A lot of things in this jungle are a weird color, but water has always looked fine. It was one of the reasons why their scientists chose this planet in the first place.</p>
<p>“You'll see.”</p>
<p>The waterfall is not very far and its presence under the next curve in the road becomes evident when the triplets jump off the trees and start running. They can hear a splash right after that, and then the unmistakable sound of children playing. Felines on this planet are clearly not afraid of water.</p>
<p>“Is Matt still angry?” Blaine asks as they sit down under a canopy of bright blue leaves. He can smell jasmine and vanilla in the air, and he's almost sure it comes from the trees around them.</p>
<p>Matt is Leo's <i>nawetsen</i>, which Blaine came to understand is not exactly a partner, at least not in the sense humans give to that word. It's more like something in between a lover and a provider. It's hard to really understand the meaning of the word – and Blaine is dying to take a trip to Leo's village to better understand this and several other concepts Leo tried to convey to him – but Blaine thinks that it stands for something very similar to a soulmate in some capacity.  He knows they chose each other, or that Matt chose him at least, so it's not a forced pairing, but Leo seems to give to the union an importance that goes beyond the mere liking. And it's definitely something tied to Matt's prominent position in whatever hierarchy is in place in the village.</p>
<p>Blaine met the guy only twice – the very first day of their arrival, when Matt came to see what the fuss was all about, and about a month later, when Matt came to see what Leo was doing with him – and none of the times things went smooth. Matt hates him, Blaine can't really blame him.</p>
<p>“He is angry,” Leo confirms. “Babies smell like you. I smell like you. You are very smelly.”</p>
<p>Blaine chuckles and he's about to say that that is not a very nice thing to say to anyone and that there's another way to say the same thing but the kids' clamoring prevents him from giving Leo another language lesson. They both turn to look at the triplets hissing and growling at each other as they fight over something. Leo stands up and asks them something in his language – this is one of the very few times Blaine hears him <i>talking</i> to the kids instead of purring and growling at them. They answer all together, and despite their limited vucabulary, Blaine still manages to catch only one out of five words, so at the end of a very agitated four-way conversation between Leo and the kittens, he's still completely in the dark about what's going on.</p>
<p>“Is something wrong?” He asks, coming closer.</p>
<p>Leo looks perplexed. “They find this.” He shows Blaine something on his palm. “What is?”</p>
<p>It's a shapeless piece of metal, which is why Leo automatically asked him. Nothing is made of metal on the planet, except for what's coming out of the camp, so it must be human. And he is right. “It's a bullet,” he answers, plucking it from Leo's hand. “But...” There is something wrong with it, and after a quick look at the caliber, Blaine knows exactly what. “It's not ours.”</p>
<p>Leo looks at him, his head tilted to the side. “Something wrong?” He repeats his question to him.</p>
<p>Blaine's mind is arleady moving twice as fast, analyzing, considering, revising, making plans. A skill he was forced to learn at the academy and that, funnily enough, he never really put into practice. This journey into space was as much expensive as it was important, and for this reason, it was sponsored because the government would never have had the money for it. Everything from their uniforms to the last piece of equipment was chosen and paid for by a different patron, weapons and bullets included. And this bullet is not one of theirs, which can only mean one thing.</p>
<p>“Take the kids, we need to go back.”</p>
<p>“What? Why?” Leo nudges his children out of the water anyway and they all follow him. “What happen? Speak me.”</p>
<p>Blaine looks around, suddenly nervous. “There's someone else on the planet,” he says. “Others like me.”</p>
<p>“Is it good-no?”</p>
<p>This is someone Blaine knows nothing of, someone who's not supposed to be here and who uses non-issued weapons. If anything, this is nothing but good-no. He decides not to tell him, though. He wants to investigate first, before spreading panic to the aliens as well. “Let's go back,” he repeats, trying to sound a little more cheeful this time. “There's chocolate at the camp.”</p>
<p>If Leo is worried, he doesn't show it. He falls right into step with him, while the kids run around them like hyperactive rubber balls, repeating <i>choco, choco, choco</i>.</p>
<p>Luckily, camp is not that far.</p>
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